My abortion made me realise how restrictive the UK’s pregnancy laws are

Seven women have been prosecuted in the UK for terminating their pregnancies since Roe v Wade was overturned in the US, writes Amelia Loulli. In order to help secure women’s rights, we must work to fully decriminalise abortion – before it’s too late

Abortion must be free, legal and available to all pregnant people (REUTERS)

Since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade last year, news stories telling of the suffering the new abortion bans are causing across America have begun to read like something out of a dystopian novel.

There have been stories of women forced to carry non-viable foetuses to full-term only to watch their babies suffer and die. These very real narratives, which feel like they could have been penned by Margaret Atwood, reached a crisis in Texas last month with the blocking and eventual denial of a court-ordered abortion for 31-year-old mother of two, Kate Cox.

Cox’s pregnancy involved a fatal foetal anomaly, the continuation of which, doctors agreed, would put her future fertility, her health and even her life at risk.

Hearing the horror stories of women in countries like America, which uphold such strict abortion laws, can make it easy to think that we’re lucky over here in England. That there isn’t anything for us to be worried about or to fight for on our sunny shores. After all, abortion is legal in England. Right?

Wrong. Abortion is illegal in England – but it shouldn’t be. Abortion must be free, legal and available to all pregnant people – with no exceptions.

Under the antiquated Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 (written at a time long before women were even allowed to vote) abortion is a criminal act punishable by prison for the pregnant people seeking it and the medical professionals performing it. Exceptions to this law are only able to be granted under the Abortions Act which passed in 1967.

Under this act, in order for someone to receive abortion care they must get the authorisation of two doctors who both agree to the presence of one of the grounds for exception set out by the act. These grounds include: that the termination is necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman; or that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated.

What does this mean in reality? Well, the truth is that childbirth is statistically so risky (261 deaths in the UK between 2019 and 2021), while abortion is statistically so safe (zero UK deaths between 2020 and 2021), that it would be difficult for anyone to argue that the continuance of a pregnancy wouldn’t involve greater risk to the life of the pregnant person than a termination.

It’s also true that abortion care providers want to meet the needs of the people they care for, so there’s unlikely to be a problem in getting those bureaucratic boxes ticked. Nobody is likely to argue with a woman who says she can’t continue with her pregnancy because she isn’t stable financially or emotionally, or she has other children to take care of, or a degree to finish, or whatever other myriad reasons a person may have for needing an abortion.

But while the Abortion Act 1967 might make abortion relatively accessible in England, it still retains abortion within criminal law, and denies women the right to abortion on demand. That is something we shouldn’t simply sit back and accept. The law means that the decision ultimately still rests with two doctors, not the pregnant person.

A woman in England cannot get an abortion simply because they want one. Instead, they must offer up a set of justifications that satisfy someone else’s judgements. We all ought to ask ourselves why this should be the case – and then listen carefully for the sexist conditioning inherent in our answers.

In this post-Roe world, there are other reasons for us to be worried. Between the OAPA passing in 1861 and November, 2022 there were only three prosecutions of women for abortions in the UK, but since December 2022 there have now been a further seven – an increase so sharp we should all be concerned.

As someone who has had an abortion, I don’t believe it’s safe for us to blithely accept the laws that currently govern pregnant people’s bodies. By not decriminalising abortion and protecting access to abortion services as a legal right (like it has been protected in Northern Ireland since 2019), we risk negatively impacting the mental and emotional wellbeing of the people having the abortions, and a perpetuation of the damaging stigmatisation of abortion care.

Ultimately, the message that these formal, legal processes send to the people accessing abortion care is that what they are doing is wrong; it is an illegal act monitored and controlled by the police and the courts. The message is that women need to come up with a good enough reason to justify breaking the law, and it’s a message that creates an attitude of guilt and shame and a stifling silence around abortion; a silence that is almost impossible to believe given how prevalent abortion is in this country.

The reality that we are being shown again and again in America is that there is no safe or reasonable way to legislate pregnancy – but as we are seeing with the shocking rise in prosecutions here in the UK, this doesn’t stop people who value their own moral objections more than the lives of women from trying. We mustn’t be complacent and let them continue to succeed. The only truly safe solution for women around the world is for abortion to be decriminalised.

Amelia Loulli’s debut poetry collection, Slip, will be published by Jonathan Cape on 23 May 2024